The Kisokaido route through Japan was ordained in the early 1600s by the country's then-ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu, who decreed that staging posts be installed along the length of the arduous passage between Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Kyoto. Inns, shops, and restaurants were established to provide sustenance and lodging to weary travellers. In 1835, renowned woodblock print artist Keisai Eisen was commissioned to create a series of works to chart the Kisokaido journey. After producing 24 prints, Eisen was replaced by Utagawa Hiroshige, who completed the series of 70 prints in 1838. Both Eisen and Hiroshige were master print practitioners. In The Sixty-Nine Stations along the Kisokaido, we find the artists' distinct styles as much as their shared expertise. From the busy starting post of Nihonbashi to the castle town of Iwamurata, Eisen opts for a more muted palette but excels in figuration, particularly of glamorous women, and relishes snapshots of activity along the route, from shoeing a horse to winnowing rice. Hiroshige demonstrates his mastery of landscape with grandiose and evocative scenes, whether it's the peaceful banks of the Ota River, the forbidding Wada Pass, or a moonlit ascent between Yawata and Mochizuki. Taken as a whole, The Sixty-Nine Stations collection represents not only a masterpiece of woodblock practice, including bold compositions and an experimental use of colour, but also a charming tapestry of 19th-century Japan, long before the spectre of industrialisation. This new Taschen super-sized XXL edition revives the series with due scale and splendour. Sourced from the only-known set of a near-complete run of the first edition of the series, this legendary publication is reproduced in optimum quality, bound in the Japanese tradition and with uncut paper. It is at once a visual delight and a major artefact from the bygone era of Imperial Japan. Japanese binding in clothbound box, 44 x 30cm, 234 pages, text in English, French and German.

Exquisitely bound in a satin cloth decorated with an Archimboldo design of the head with the face made of flowers and plants and this outsize volume has a pink satin pagemarker and double gate centre pages, stunning black glossy background highlighting its treasures and many of these collectables are made of Nautilus shells with gilt-bronze settings decorated with dolphins, a lion's mouth, and some encrusted with rubies and turquoises. There are ornamental goblets, cups, exquisite glassware, shells of all shapes and colours, many in glass fronted cabinets, and the more gruesome skeletons, lizards and snakes and frogs, and more tasteful collections cameos, marble, silverware, and in today's eyes less tasteful rare birds, carved and inlaid ivory, armadillos, alligators, carved ebony servants. Seven countries Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and England have been chosen with museums natural history, chateau, private collections, the Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha, Uppsala University in Sweden and curiosities of fantastic drawings, portraiture, semiprecious stones, collections of macabre paintings of humans with animal faces dressed in Tudor costumes, a man with a bloodied eye and the other eye socket pierced with a spear, there are decorative ships and dragons and all manner of shapes and colours and ideas for interior design, reflecting the history of collecting with beautiful objects, weapons and natural curiosities. The unique new Taschen publication, dripping with colour. The Wunderkammer, or "cabinet of curiosities," saw collectors gathering objects from many strands of artistic, scientific and intellectual endeavour, in an ambitious attempt to encompass all of humankind's knowledge in a single room. From the Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg, these aristocratic virtuosos acquired, selected and displayed the objects in real-life catalogues that represented the entire world - spanning architecture, interior design, painting, sculpture, gemology, geology, botany, biology and taxonomy, astrology, alchemy, anthropology, ethnography and history. Marvel at the unicorn horns (narwhal tusks), gems, rare coral growths, Murano glasswork, paintings and peculiar mechanical automata. Browse through illustrations of exotic and mythical creatures and discover the famed "Coburg ivories," an astounding collection of crafted artifacts. These collections are nothing short of a journey through time, from the Renaissance and Age of Discovery, the Mannerist and Baroque periods, up to the present day. Massimo Listri travelled to seven European countries over several decades and the result is a set of gorgeous photographs on each of 19 astonishing chambers, highlighting the most remarkable items in each collection. Text in English, French and German. Colour. 29 x 39½cm, 5.04 kg, 356 pages.

Frederick Daniel, George, Heywood, James and their descendants are the celebrated Hardy family of artists, some of the leading genre painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Heywood Hardy was one of the best Victorian animal painters and instrumental in advancing a more realistic portrayal of animals, leaving behind the romanticised representations of Landseer. His elder brother James was amongst the most accomplished sporting artists of the day, while their cousins Frederick Daniel and George painted some of the most sympathetic pictures of county towns and villages. Here is putting at Blackheath, a splendid music room at Brighton Pavilion, a Scottish country scene of a young gillie with his setter dogs and dead game, stunning portraits of Grand National-winning horses, foxhounds and hunting dogs and hunting scenes, riding on sand dunes in Morecambe as young girls and women enjoy holiday time in 1908, the sale of Cavalry horses in 1884, two Victorian ladies being scared by a bull over the fence, a lion cub, corn stooks by Bray Church, a mother and child posting a letter, a baby's birthday and other family scenes like taking in orphans, a firstborn and trying on spectacles. James Hardy Sr was a miniature portrait painter; his granddaughter Mable Emily Lee-Hankey maintained the tradition and painted a famous series of miniatures of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, held in the Royal Collection. The author discusses the life and work of each artist and the influences of each other's paintings, the context of artistic and social developments and draws on contemporary sources to expertly illustrate how critics and collectors viewed the work of the Hardy family. Many are reproduced here in colour for the very first time in this beautifully made 224 page large art gallery, 9½" x 12". Colour.

Ren Hang, who took his life February 23, 2017, was an unlikely rebel. Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 29-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront of Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. His models, friends, and in his last years, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever entered his mind at the moment. He denied his intentions were sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview said "It's not just dicks I?m interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way." True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed were not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large. Hang also stated, "Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex," making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website and Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs. Taschen's new book covers his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. Text in English, French and German. 8.9" x 11.8", 312 pages. New from Taschen.

Pop artist, painter of modern life, landscape painter, master of colour, explorer of image and perception, for six decades, David Hockney has been known as an artist who always finds new ways of exploring the world and its representational possibilities. He has consistently created unforgettable images: works with graphic lines and integrated text in the Swinging Sixties in London; the famous swimming pool series as a representation of the 1970s California lifestyle; closely observed portraits and brightly coloured, oversized landscapes after his eventual return to his native Yorkshire. In addition to drawings in which he transfers what he sees directly onto paper, there are multiperspective Polaroid collages that open up the space into a myriad of detailed views, and iPad drawings in which he captures light using a most modern medium -testaments to Hockney's enduring delight in experimentation. This special edition has been newly assembled from the two volumes of the David Hockney: A Bigger Book monograph to celebrate art publisher Taschen's 40th anniversary. Hockney's life and work is presented year by year as a dialogue between his works and voices from the time period, alongside reviews and reflections by the artist in a chronological text, supplemented by portrait photographs and exhibition views. Together they open up new perspectives, page after page, revealing how Hockney undertakes his artistic research, how his painting develops, and where he finds inspiration for his multifaceted work. 15.6 x 21.7cm, 1.47 kg, 512 pages. Glorious colour reproductions. New from Taschen.

The collection in this book is divided between the seasons. Coca-Cola scenes in spring and summer include a covered wooden bridge with the Coca-Cola logo painted along its length. The interior of a country store in April boasts a Coca-Cola vending machine. A wooden auto-repair shack in the bright August sun announces "We fix flats" and underneath, "Bring Coca-Cola". In the winter some of the same scenes are depicted snowbound, with the bleakness of an empty barn in February relieved by the bright red of the advertising. Jim Harrison is renowned throughout the world for paintings of the American landscape that always include Coca-Cola signs. In 1952, in his home town of Denmark, South Carolina, Jim asked the local poster-painter, J. J. Cornforth, for a holiday job. Denmark had a Coca-Cola bottling plant and most of Cornforth's sign work was based on the company's advertising. As Jim's lettering skills and speed increased, he got other sign jobs, and at the same time he became interested in painting studies of Coca-Cola signs in the landscape. During Jim's college days he continued with his sign work and started his own shop, while at the same time pursuing his ambition to be head football coach at a high school. The time came when he had to choose between a career in art or joining the Furman University football staff. He chose art and headed to New York, gradually making a name for himself with paintings that seemed to capture the spirit of America. Eventually he became a licensee of the Coca-Cola Company, commissioned to create artworks featuring the brand. 103pp, over 70 colour reproductions.
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Fans of the trilogy His Dark Materials will love this sumptuously illustrated edition of the first volume, with evocative modern drawings in colour to illustrate every stage in Lyra's epic story. The cast of characters assembled in Oxford's Jordan College all have their own daemon, a shapeshifting alter ego that helps them through life. At atmospheric illustration shows Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon as they gatecrash the gloomy college dining room and see the Master pouring poison into a decanter intended for Lyra's uncle Asriel (daemon: a snow leopard). When Lyra warns Asriel of his imminent peril he dashes the decanter to the ground as if by accident, but although Lyra has saved his life she later overhears the Master saying that the attempted poisoning was done for her sake and Asriel's continued existence will mean terrible suffering for Lyra. When the Gobblers arrive in Oxford and children start disappearing, Lyra is persuaded by the sinister Mrs Coulter to be her assistant, initially charmed by her attractiveness but soon finding herself in a group of young people under coercive control. Lyra's friend Roger, the kitchen boy, becomes one of the disappeared and Lyra believes she can save him when she joins her uncle's expedition to the far north, with only her daemon and the golden compass, or alethiometer (truth machine), to help her. The object of their quest is a mysterious dust which holds the key to an alternative world. The superb illustrations feature every stage of Lyra's adventure including the Northern Lights, rocky chasms, a ride in a balloon and a selection of ferocious animals. 288pp, sumptuous large edition with numerous high-quality illustrations. Remainder mark on this rare US import.
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